Don’t forget Lutris. It may take a bit more tinkering than Steam, but if you have loose games or use multiple games launchers, Lutris can combine them all into one neat and tidy launcher.

And I rest my case, lol. I don’t even know the difference between init and initramfs. It’s definitely a hole in my knowledge and I should know it going down the line, but I need the right time.

I’m here and there on what I want to learn at any moment. It’s not like I can’t learn, but it’s all about what interests me at the time. I learn things in a scattered manner, which admittedly is a horrible way to learn but its just how my brain works.

I’m a very mid-level Linux user. I use systemd because I’m just not familiar with how init systems actually work. I love that the choice is there, but I think systemd has it’s place with users like me that get confused.

That being said, I did run Dracut on EndeavourOS because it was recommended for that distro. I never dived into it to see what the exact difference was, though I do remember running into some things I needed to do that Dracut did differently. There may come a day when I dive into inits, but for now I’m just happy if my system boots to desktop.

You’re not wrong, though. If you want all your packages to work correctly, you gotta stay up to date. I know some of my packages will break if I go more than a week.

Yesterday I read about RATs becoming more frequent in the AUR in some packages. They predict that they’re going to become more frequent soon. I’m wondering if it might be time to switch my main machine to NixOS now. I may check out Bazzite and Nobara first, though.

However, I guess Arch is doing something to protect against these? It’s going to be part of BumpBuddy.

Yeah, that checks out. I think there’s other ways of doing it, I just never manages to get it working. I’ll have to check again, but I thought KDE had something in the system settings that let you swap versions. I could be just misremembering the kernel swap settings though.

There’s also some nvidia command hoodoo I tried and everything went well except at the end where I wound up with no graphical output at all, lol. I did a lot of messing around on fresh installs until the cord swap finally worked.

Yeah, it does make sense that you can compare them in that sense, but as far as actual system setup goes, I don’t think they’re comparable. Don’t get me wrong, I love NixOS. When I was learning nixlang and setting up everything to be modular and reproducible, I was having a blast.

However, I also had a blast learning Arch and figuring out how my system works the way it does. I’ll be honest, though, NixOS helped me learn how Home was separate from Root. That alone really helped me learn how the general Linux system file hierarchy worked.

But there are also things I would have never learned about Linux if I never messed with Arch, such as essential system symlinks, how they work, and how to use chroot in the live environment to fix broken ones (thanks to a botched Arch update, lol).

If you like it, learn it-use it. All this comparing and inter-distro warring seems pointless. There’s not a distro I’ve used that I haven’t had things I really liked and really hated.

I had some weird artifacting issues in an older version of Nvidia proprietary. While viewing certain windows or colors, my screen would flicker, or else I would get weird diagonal lines across my whole screen.

I went nuts trying to figure it out. In the end since I started on Pop!_OS, I just easily rolled back to a previous version of the proprietary drivers and called it good. Well, later I wanted to try EndeavourOS. I was too noob to figure how to roll back the drivers there.

So a friend asked me, “Are you using display port or HDMI? Try the other one.” I highly doubted that would fix anything, but for the sake of trying everything, I switched to HDMI. And well… fuck me if it didn’t work. I’ve just been running HDMI ever since.

I’m more in the group of Nix != Arch. They’re just different. I love them both, tbh.

I would like to add that I have never recommended them to beginners. I usually like to recommend Pop!_OS.

I really have been wanting to try Bazzite lately, too.

You should try it.iusearchbtw

I’m not sure how fast the pacman repo updates, but I’m using that plus Syncthing-Fork from F-Droid. I don’t think they’ve dropped 2.0 in there, yet.

Looks like the Arch Syncthing package upstream URL is the official Syncthing and is running 2.0.1. I can now confirm that 1.x from Syncthing-Fork works fine with Syncthing 2.0. I just set it up this morning, oddly enough.

I’ve never really used Ubuntu, but I’m going to agree with others here. If its what you use, it would be better in the sense that it would be much easier for you to give her phone assistance when she needs it, rather than giving her something you’re not used to and possibly having to go over and troubleshoot for her.

If she wants something more in the line with Windows, you could try Kubuntu, but I think the rigging behind KDE is pretty complicated for a casual user. You may want to help her set up the way she wants her desktop to look at first if you go this route. The only other Windows-like desktop is Cinnamon, but Cinnamon-Wayland is still in alpha and once they officially drop it that could make more work for you later.

Admittedly, I have 0 experience with the Unity DE, so that’d be your call if you think you can familiarize it for her.

Manjaro has been pretty quiet for a long time. There’s gotta be a point where we forgive and forget. I like Manjaro and used it as my entry point to Arch. It sets a lot more up for you out of the box and has manjaro-specific package bundles that just work on install.

According to Manjarno, its been just under three years since their last mistake, and that was just forgetting to renew the SSL cert for their archived forums. Probably about time we let it back into the Arch family.

My ADHD brain counting all the legs on these mfers for the past five minutes…

Sleep/hibernate has been a pretty big problem for a while. As for the gpu, have you checked out NixOS? There’s ways to enforce your integrated card to handle everything and change states for certain apps to the discreet card.

It takes a bit to learn, but nixlang is pretty simple. I’ve heard it referred to as “JSON with functions”. It also has the largest package repository of any OS and is atomic, so its hard as hell to break. You can even make separate, containerized dev environments with flakes.

I have heard about the IoT version. I’d have to look more into it, but I doubt I’m going back now that I’ve learned so much about Linux. I can troubleshoot most of Arch without touching the docs or asking online now, so it really defeats the purpose of switching back.

I also enjoy putting in a little effort to get things working. That’s the thing about Linux. Most people that daily drive it get a dopamine release from tinkering with it and fixing things, and I’m one of those people.

I know there has been a big “its for everyone” push these days, but its really not. So I’m glad the IoT version exists for those that want or need it.

Rufus is great and I still keep a copy around, but I haven’t gone back since I found Ventoy. You just run Ventoy on your stick, and then drag and drop any and all bootable ISOs into it. When you boot it, you get a list of all the ISOs to work with.

The only caveat is that you absolutely have to eject the USB, or else Ventoy probably will corrupt. That’s a small price to pay to have Arch, Mint, Fedora, NixOS, and Win11 all on one OS ISO toolkit drive, plus I always eject my drives as a rule of thumb. Then all I have to do is update them every couple months.

Takes a lot more to fully deshittify it, though. I’ve been down that road. So much registry diving, so many third party apps, strongarming uninstallations of bloatware through brute force, and just all around weeks of work.

When the screenshot shit was announced the first time, I just got tired of looking for workarounds to disable or remove Microsoft’s active attempts of policing, spying, and triple-dip profiting off it’s paying customers.

Lol, I just mention it because I have no other experience with Ladybird. There’s an Ubuntu/Debian section and a Choco for Windows. I would assume macOS uses homebrew, but I didn’t read that far into it. I can only confirm that I got the Arch version working after a bit of compiling.

You can already test it out in very early alpha, but I can tell you now that it’s just a portal with very basic browser controls. You’ll have to build it through the Python script.

I built it through Arch already and its a working browser is about all I can really say about it. The little I tried of it works.

The instructions to build the early alpha are on the github page here.

It wasn’t supposed to stay Apple exclusive. In fact, when I last used Windows there was a beta build out for Arc. However, there were also multiple Firefox styles in the CSS Store that made Firefox into Arc.

Then Zen Browser came out, and I’m currently watching it get very popular. I don’t doubt that Zen Browser is one of the reasons Arc is shutting down. It’s nearly an exact copy, but now with more features (and is constantly coming out with even more faster than Arc can think of them).

I’m excited for Ladybird as well, but I’m not expecting anything crazy when it comes out of alpha and beta. I fully expect to wait a bit, maybe download to contribute some troubleshooting, but it may not be viable as a main use browser for a long time yet.